Old Dominion Leads the Way

Old Dominion University is in Norfolk, Virginia, a small city right on the edge of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. It is part of a metropolitan area of almost 2 million people called Hampton Roads that also includes Newport News and Virginia Beach.

Hampton Roads is one of the two most vulnerable metropolitan areas in the US to rapid sea level rise (the other is New Orleans).

Sea level is rising at about twice the rate of the global average along the coast north of Cape Hatteras, centered on Chesapeake Bay (sciencenews.org)

Global sea levels rise as a result of the melting land-based glaciers of Greenland and the West Antarctic Peninsula as well as the thermal expansion of warming waters – an average of 22 cm (8 in) since 1930. What makes Hampton Roads of special interest is that sea levels there are rising twice as fast as the average.

Old Dominion University has established the Center of Sea Level Rise and the Mitigation and Adaptation Research Institute (MARI). It has chosen to be in the thick of it all.

Why such rapid sea level rise? And why there?

Partly it is because the land in that region is also sinking – the mile thick glaciers of the last glaciation did not reach so far south, but they compressed the land they did cover, forcing the land beyond them to bulge up. Since the glaciers withdrew, the land they compressed has risen again, while the bulge to their south is still falling back to its pre-glaciation state. Along with subsidence of the land from extraction of groundwater, this accounts for about half of the current rapid rise of sea level.

Sea level rise north of Cape Hatteras is about half due to recent climate change, and about half due to the land level readjustments following the retreat of the glaciers (americanroads.us

So Hampton Roads has immediate challenges, finding ways to adapt to the sea level rise sooner than most coastlines elsewhere. Coastal beaches and wetlands will certainly deteriorate, and the low lying parts of the coastal cities will be flooded. Norfolk is especially vulnerable. Pretty well everyone living there now knows this.

Old Dominion has taken the lead in a pilot project aimed at developing a comprehensive government and community cooperation in preparing for further sea level rise in Hampton Roads. In the past couple of weeks MARI has hosted seminars involving residents and state officials, focusing on resilience and environmental engineering and on perceptions of climate change and sea level rise, encouraging a willingness to address change.

In the past year it held a Rising to the Challenge Conference on sea level rise with strong bipartisan support from Congressional ans State politicians – in itself a rare and extraordinary event.

And everything, in the context of preparedness and resiliency, is on the table: tide gates, levees, flood walls, raised buildings and roads, marshes created to absorb storm surge, abandonment of low lying areas, elimination of subsidized flood insurance – the list is very real and very serious. The cities of Washington,D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia all have reason to be watching closely.

Part of the US navy of 2012 at Norfolk Naval Base – which covers 4 miles of coastline and has 7 miles of piers (wikipedia.org).

And then there is the military. Nearby is the Norfolk Naval Base, the world’s largest naval base. Old Dominion has also recently hosted discussions by the military on how to prepare the naval base for the tidal flooding and extreme storm surges associated with sea level rise, while contemplateing the immense upheaval of having to move.

Meanwhile, home owners in the lowest parts of Norfolk can find no buyers for their homes, and as one pastor says
“I don’t know many churches that have to put the tide chart on their Web site so people know whether they can get to church.”

So: Go, Old Dominion. The whole world isn’t watching, but probably should be.